Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: m+ fonts

I’ve decided to try to feature one cool unpackaged-in-Fedora but freely-licensed font per week for the foreseeable future. There’s a couple of reasons I’d like to do this:

To simply keep up with the freely-licensed font options available, and share them for other designers’ benefit. Since I last did a review of freely-licensed fonts in September 2007, there has been a huge explosion of freely-licensed fonts, many of which are of a more impressive quality than ever available before. Whereas not so long ago in the past I could rattle off a handful of freely-licensed fonts I considered ‘good’ off the top of my head, these days it’s hard for me to keep up!

To inspire folks to get involved in packaging, specifically font packaging.Shamelessbeggingfont package requests via blog have worked in the past. I think it’s maybe a little overwhelming to look at the font SIG font wishlist and figure out which font to package. By highlighting one font at a time, I’m hoping to make it a little less overwhelming.

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About Máirín Duffy

Máirín is a principal interaction designer at Red Hat. She is passionate about software freedom and free & open source tools, particularly in the creative domain: her favorite application is Inkscape. You can read more from Máirín on her blog at blog.linuxgrrl.com.

If you knew anyone competent, capable, and interested in fixing the presentation of fonts in Fedora/GNOME, that would be something great to push for. I like having cool fonts in here, but first I’d like to be able to find the fonts. Perhaps a tree that groups them by, say, Baekmuk, and lets you toggle its descendants into view, or groups them by intended locale, or at least shows the locale.

Also, I’m sure some of the fonts listed above aren’t installed on everyone’s machine, though I’m not sure how they get onto mine (package dependencies?) .

That said, I do like the fonts you profile for packaging here. I just feel like, even if packaged, it wouldn’t help too much, because they’d have poor discoverability on my system.

One of the great strengths of the free desktop is its support for any common language and script. I love being able to freely mix English, Japanese, and my native Dutch without worrying about fonts, encodings, or installed languages. I want to run GNUCash in Dutch, because managing your finances is difficult enough without having all those terms in English, but I do prefer the rest to be in English. I also develop software that deals with Japanese text, so that needs to be possible to, and it is! Even if your locale is not known for using characters supported by those fonts, not being able to display them would unnecessarily cripple the OS. I don’t want to go back to the Windows days of ⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕⎕.

All this comes at a price. We need a number of fonts to provide a base coverage of all those scripts. Having those fonts is a good thing, but I agree that a way of categorising them is desirable. This may be good to file as distribution bug in the various distros. Of course, how would you deal with a font like AR PL * ? They do support the Roman script, just not very elegantly.

The AR PL fonts are Chinese.
The Baekmuk set Korean.
The rest sounds like South Asia to me.

I think there is a confusion: we have two type of fonts, some are fonts that cover specific locales and some are artistic fonts, used to create graphics.
In this post Mo is asking for artistic fonts, which are not supposed to be installed by default, only to be available for those interested.

Actually, AR PL UKai CN is a much better name for a l10n font than Baekmuk Batang because the former tells me what locale/script it is for (zh_CN, i.e. simplified Chinese script) whereas the latter doesn’t (in fact, it doesn’t even tell me that it’s a l10n font and not an artistic font).

I’d be happy to package some fonts being a bit of a typography geek. I have some experiencing with packaging software for Centos, so it should’nt be much difference if any. Perhaps you can point me in the right direction to get started.

If we have time on Friday, I can walk you through doing one. I’m still pretty new to the packaging process myself, but it’s something I can at least stumble through by this point, and we’ve got the IRC channel and the mailing list.

If we don’t have time on Friday, show me another font you like then and I’ll do it later that evening while waiting for my aunt to pick me up. ;-)

@marin, Just to clear up a few things, I have expressed interest in packaging fonts but not confirmed that I will be packaging m+, although the general consensus appears to be I am in the progress of packaging it. It would have been nice to confirm this before announcing that I’m in the “in the process of packaging it” as per your post here: https://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/unpackaged-font-of-the-week-anonymous-pro/. Please confirm this in future.

On the other hand, I have confirmed with Dave Ludlow just now, that I will be taking over the packaging of m+. I’ve just finished the some other processes on the aforementioned links.

Lastly, Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, perhaps we’ll chat soon on IRC.

Hi Igshaan, oh okay, sorry about any confusion. To be fair, what happened is that I looked up the font packaging request status, and the font was listed in the ‘in progress’ state. I did say the font was in-progress, the problem is I made the assumption that you had made the status change since you had expressed some interest. Actually, Dave had moved the state and I didn’t know. So I’m sorry for making that false assumption.

The next time I post an update on a font request I’ll be sure to follow up with those who expressed interest to make sure I don’t announce anything they’re not comfortable with. Sorry again!